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This time of year, financial Websites are flooded with stories that attempt to handicap the broader stock market going forward. At the other end of the spectrum, there are always pieces that attempt to predict the future motions of individual stocks.

But articles that look at timely sectors – and ways to play them – tend to be few and far between. Yet, for many investors, playing specific industries through exchange-traded funds may be the best way to build a portfolio.

And one doesn't have to travel to the farthest reaches of the frontier markets to find these yields.

It's always interesting when two leading online financial writers take radically different views on an investment topic. Over the weekend, Motley Fool columnist Morgan Housel weighed in with a piece that argues that long-term investment thinking has finally died off.

Motley Fool

"The final blow came Monday, when a trader on CNBC warned that a 10% market pullback -- which has occurred on average every 11 months over the last century -- could be 'devastating' for investors,'' wrote Housel.

I'm generally a fan of Housel, a writer who has a gift for finding the simple truths in investing.

But he was clearly off-base with this column. Or at least his timing was severely off. A column mourning the death of long-term investing might have made more sense during the height of the day-trading boom of the late 1990s. These days, many investors, after having been stung by both the dot-com bust of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008, are back to basics. Many of those day traders have moved on to other pursuits.

"The weird thing about this column is that long-term thinking isn't dead at all; in fact, it's never been healthier," writes Salmon. "Housel did manage to find a trader on CNBC exhibiting symptoms of short-term thinking — but that's what CNBC does, and in fact it's possible to use CNBC's ratings as a reasonably good proxy for the general prevalence of short-term thinking. Guess what: they're at their lowest point in 20 years, with the channel reaching just 38,000 viewers over the course of a day.

"Meanwhile, long-term thinking's true friends at Vanguard have never been healthier: the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund is now the largest mutual fund in the world," Salmon writes.

I've met Housel and he's an extremely likable guy as well as a talented journalist. But I'm glad he's wrong on this point.